I just finished “First As Tragedy Then As Farce”, and I’m a little disappointed. The book is full of pointing out contradictions and problems, suggesting interpretations, and criticizing everything left and right. While I found the writing style hard to follow and had lots of problems with the arguments, the main frustration was that he doesn’t attempt to build anything up. You wrote that I “criticise Zizek for not giving any alternatives to (cultural) capitalism, and yet he clearly has never been in the same room as a Zizek book”, but even now that I’ve read this book through I would make the same criticism. The closest he gets is saying that we need to make a fresh go of communism, from the beginning, but there’s nothing about why we should expect better results this time or how we should go about it.
Requested it from the library!
I hope you enjoy it. Even if you dislike his arguments, his writing style is wonderfully unique.
I just finished “First As Tragedy Then As Farce”, and I’m a little disappointed. The book is full of pointing out contradictions and problems, suggesting interpretations, and criticizing everything left and right. While I found the writing style hard to follow and had lots of problems with the arguments, the main frustration was that he doesn’t attempt to build anything up. You wrote that I “criticise Zizek for not giving any alternatives to (cultural) capitalism, and yet he clearly has never been in the same room as a Zizek book”, but even now that I’ve read this book through I would make the same criticism. The closest he gets is saying that we need to make a fresh go of communism, from the beginning, but there’s nothing about why we should expect better results this time or how we should go about it.